”Covering it up 24 hours, that probably wasn’t the smartest move,” Timlin said. ”Both those guys, I’m not sure how old Cheney is, but your reaction time, it’s not the same. And the lawyer — he’s 70-something — guaranteed he was sitting and watching the same bird. He might have been aiming at the thing. You’ve got to be careful.”

Timlin’s biggest worry, he said, when he heard about the accident? ”The antigun activists that are going, ‘OK, look, this is what happens.’

”Now my son, in the neighborhood they have these air soft guns, all the kids have ‘em. It shoots a BB. But when we had BB guns, they had these little BBs. These guns, the BBs are about this big [holding his fingers nearly a half-inch apart] and they’re plastic. They’re shot with air or CO2 or spring, they look like a regular 45 or 44 or shotgun, and the [BBs] are moving 200 feet a second.

”It hurts. These kids are out there shooting each other. My son came home, he had a dot on his cheek and a knot on his forehead, even though he had a facemask. I keep telling him. I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Look, if you come home and you have dots on your face or knots on your face, I don’t want to hear about it because I’m telling you, we don’t want to shoot nobody. Even just pretending, you don’t want to do it.’

”My wife says they don’t need to do that. I said, ‘Look, I totally agree with you.’ But our next-door neighbor, who is an animal lover, she’s like, ‘I can’t believe you shoot deer.’ It’s OK with her that her boys have these things, and they’re doing all the shooting.

”Here we are shooting each other, but it’s not OK to shoot animals? There are a lot more animals in this world than people.”

And if Team USA wins the World Baseball Classic and Dick Cheney invites him hunting as a reward?

”I don’t know if he shoots righthanded or lefthanded,” said Timlin. ”I think he’s righthanded. So I’ll be on his right shoulder.”